How to Play Preferans
Description
A serious Eastern European trick-taking game with bidding, a widow, and a whist-style scoring system. Slow to learn, deeply strategic to play.
Objective
Bid for the right to name a contract, then either fulfil it by winning enough tricks, or defend against whoever did.
Setup
Three active players, using a 32-card deck — just 7 through Ace in each suit.
Deal ten cards to each player, with two extra cards set aside as a hidden widow.
Rules
Bidding decides the contract: players bid increasingly ambitious combinations of trump suit and number of tricks they'll win, or bid "misère" — a promise to win no tricks at all, played without any trump.
The winning bidder picks up the widow, adds it to their hand, and discards two cards to get back to ten.
Each player who passed on the final contract must declare whether they are in whist — playing to defeat the contract — or passing entirely and sitting the hand out with no stake in the result.
The bidder leads first. Follow suit if you can; if you can't, play trump if one's in play, or anything if not.
Winning
In a normal contract, the bidder needs to reach or beat their declared number of tricks; falling short costs them, succeeding scores in their favor.
In a misère contract, the bidder wins by taking zero tricks — taking even one fails it entirely.
Each defender in whist scores or loses based on whether the contract they defended against succeeded or failed, independent of the other defender.
Full traditional scoring uses a running pool tracked across many hands, and the exact point values are famously inconsistent between regional variants. Most groups agree a simplified target — most points, or fewest failures — before playing, and that is the recommended approach here.